1. Technical Field
This disclosure concerns data models and management systems for compound media assets and their specific components. In particular, this disclosure relates to a flexible and easily extensible digital asset management data model and system that uses the model to provide telecommunication service providers with the ability to efficiently acquire, catalogue, modify, store, retrieve and publish compound media assets.
2. Background Information
The ongoing dynamics within the telecommunications industry continue to create both challenges and opportunities for companies competing to identify new channels of revenue. Rapid advances in computer systems and telecommunications technologies have driven the need for methods and systems to manage an exponential demand for media content and support of a vast array of rich media services offerings. Telecommunications subscribers now receive rich media that includes any combination of audio, graphics and video data, from a wide range of sources and types (e.g., movies, news, advertisement, and sports sources). Traditional wireline or fixed services operators recognize increased competition from wireless or mobile operators resulting from the fixed-mobile substitution phenomenon or convergence of fixed-mobile service offerings. Some of the telecommunications services leveraging rich media include traditional television service, Internet service, cable television service, cellular phone service, messaging service, and combined voice and data delivery service.
The amount and types of compound media assets delivered through wireless and wireline based telecommunications devices continue to expand. For example, a movie-asset received from a content provider could be composed of a movie, several trailers, covers, digital and analogue format renditions (i.e., different file formats with accompanying rich media information), and a set of descriptive information such as intellectual property rights, pricing information, actors, writers, title, summary, description, language, dubbed languages, subtitles, and duration of each part. Hundreds of media formats exist, each with its own characteristics and proprietary format. Telecommunications service providers must integrate the rich media content, which in many cases are in disparate formats and possess other unique attributes, from various content providers and content aggregators before delivering this content to subscribers. As a result, telecommunications service providers continue to struggle to identify systems capable of efficiently and cost effectively integrating compound media assets, and managing the entire content life-cycle. In the past, no sufficiently flexible and efficient end-to-end mechanism for controlling rich media assets existed. Telecommunications service providers are now faced with difficult technical interoperability challenges related to storing, cataloguing, bundling and publishing rich media content with enriched metadata to support the content lifecycle and rapid development of new rich media service offerings.
Creating and managing various levels of granularity or metadata, and different sets of file types and formats (i.e., renditions) used throughout the digital asset processing life-cycle, and optimizing asset relationships and related search functionalities pose significant technical challenges. As one example, there is a technical challenge in defining and implementing a data model sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate inefficient methods of editing, rendering, distributing, broadcasting, publishing and creating media programming from different content providers. It is also a significant technical challenge to create a digital asset management data model which can manage unstructured compound media asset information from various content providers, and coherently model all information related to a media asset, and which has the ability to both normalize the disparate media formats into a unique flexible model, and easily incorporate new content formats. Another technical challenge lies in providing a data model which efficiently and flexibly supports metadata enrichment, and allows one to economically preserve and reuse content. Yet another technical challenge lies in providing a mechanism for efficiently cataloguing, storing and updating rich media assets, which supports higher performance during the operation and upgrade of service management logic.
A need has long existed for a flexible and easily extensible digital asset management data model and system that provide telecommunications service providers with the ability to organize and efficiently manage compound media assets. The digital asset management data model solves the technical problem of reducing the complexity of rapidly producing rich media service offerings efficiently and cost effectively.